October 2006

Maybe you're drinking too much or punching cones for breakfast. Perhaps you're sleeping all the time and just can't seem to quiet the negative chatter in your head. "You've got nothing, you're a loser, why even try?"

You don't feel like socialising, seeing your friends or family, because it reminds you how big the gap is between where you are and where everyone thinks you should be. Maybe it's been going on so long, the slide so subtle, you didn't even notice you'd wandered off the path and into the wilderness?

It's a tough business working out if you're depressed, a pessimist or just a surly bastard with a bad attitude. What are the benchmarks? How do you differentiate a clinical condition from a bad mood or, worse, a bad brain?

A man barely alive. Drinking too much. Too scared to talk to women, to live outside a PlayStation universe. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to construct the world's first All Men Are Liars man. You can be that man. Better than you were before. Better, stronger, faster.

In the last three months I've had some emails from you, gentle readers, which have been just a little sad. A few guys have written asking for advice with women and, where possible, I've offered help. However, other correspondents have revealed such a fundamental lack of knowledge about the opposite sex, it left me wondering what the hell I or anybody could do to change the situation?

Then it struck me that maybe the All Men Are Liars community could take this to a whole 'nother level? Maybe we could build a better man, turn a mook into a machine. A dork into a dude. Create a hellman. A heart-throb ... or at least, find him a girlfriend.

So here's what I'm proposing, people. If you're a guy (or you know one) who's just a little lost at the moment and can't seem to get yourself sorted, I want you to email me your picture and bit about yourself and we'll put you through "Bloke School". We're gonna get you fit, teach you how to dress, how to talk to women and, hopefully, feel a little better about yourself.

Copped a bit of flack last week about YouTube Friday, with some of you claiming it was mindless and lazy, to which all I say is ... that's affirmative.

Today we're doing a bit of music video time-travel back to the bad old days of the '70s and '80s, to show you two of the most sublime clips ever created. The first is for American band Journey's 1983 hit Separate Ways and features extensive air guitar (and air synth and air drums) as well as pretty much everything that was wrong and right about the '80s. You really can't beat this clip. That is until you watch Denmark's "King of Pop" Tommy Seebach in the music video for his 1977 single Apache. I can't even get my head around how this bloke sat in an edit suite and thought, "Damn, I'm lookin' gooooood in this clip." It's truly a cheese masterpiece. And lastly, if you think we're oh-so-sophisticated nowadays and could never produce such visual horrors, I have one more beauty for you: Britney Spears' husband, Kevin Federline's, new music video, released just last month ...

How many times have you heard a woman utter the words, "I wish guys would just be honest?" or, "Why can't men say what's on their minds?" or, my personal favourite, "I'm so sick of guys playing games". You want to know why we do this stuff?

On the other hand, there's this equation: be honest with women = information used against you at a later date = never-ending misery.

Last week a New Zealand law clerk named Craig Dale learned this the hard way. "Chippa", as he's known to his mates, sent an email to a chick called Azadeh Bashari at a rival law firm laying his cards on the table. The couple had been on one unsuccessful date, so he thought he'd cut through the crap and put an ungilded offer of sex out there. You can read his email here, if you like. And you know why you're able to read it? Because Ms Bashari forwarded it to her friends, who forwarded it to their friends and now Chippa is being laughed at as a loser across the world, just for being honest ...

My female friend Wildcat and I were walking through a red-light district last month and she grabbed my arm and said "can we go in here?"

"Here" was a sex shop called Beef Curtains*; two storeys of chocolate and Sambuca body sauce, teddy bears with eight-centimetre furry todgers, lingerie that gave me a polyester rash just looking at it and, of course, enough dildos to arm the entire London police force.

Having not been in one of these stores for some years I was stunned by the range and sophistication of the sex toys. They had the old-school Hustler hardcore solid metal penis, Ice Vibe strobing spheres, the Clit Critter, Rockin' Rabbit his and hers sex machine and then, gleaming on a backlit podium all by itself was this  the Beyond 2000 triple stimulator with "separate controls for the twirling shaft, clitoral stimulator and anal arouser".

"Great googily moogily," I said to my friend as I hefted the thing and she read from the box. "It lets you choose from three different speeds of shaft rotation and seven different pulsation patterns for the flexible jelly clitoral stimulator and separate plug-in anal arouser."

I was staggered. Then I got scared. I mean how the hell do you compete with this?

Last year I went to listen to a speech given by one of world's leading violinists. This guy is seriously famous in classical music circles, an absolute freak. An American, he plays all over the world making a small fortune from his prodigious talents. Before he went on stage, a girlfriend of mine introduced me to him; we exchanged pleasantries and then stood listening to the first speaker, a woman. She crapped on for a while and then made a lame joke denigrating men. The gathered culture vultures chuckled and I turned to the violinist and said: "Put shit on blokes, gets laughs anywhere in the world, eh?" He nodded and said: "This is how I'm gonna start my speech; 'How do you make a woman orgasm? Who cares?'" I'd heard the joke before but smiled. Then he backed that up with: "What do you say to a woman when she gets out of a domestic violence half-way house? 'Get back in the kitchen'." I said, "come on mate," semi-indulging him and then it was time for him to go on stage. He muttered, "I gotta fart" and walked up to the microphone. Suffice to say he didn't repeat the jokes he'd just told me for the crowd ...

Most men when they meet a woman will ask themselves the mental question "would I sleep with her?" Similar to this is the instinct of sizing up a bloke when you're introduced, to calculate if you could bash him should things ever get ugly. Knowing how to fight is a fundamental male skill and, whether we like it or not, it subconsciously informs almost every interaction you have with other men. We are less likely to accept poor or insulting behaivour from a 160-centimetre pissant* (unless his name is Kostya) than we are a 110-kilogram certified hardman who we know can punch six shades of shit out of any being who crosses his path. The thing about knowing how to fight is it narrows the spectrum of crap you have to accept from blokes, and if applied properly, leads to a more noble life ...

The suggestions for YouTube Friday have been arriving at the All Men Are Liars penthouse thick and fast and it's a pretty interesting window into what makes you lot tick. Some of you are fired up over politics, others just want a chuckle and at least one of you likes seeing people do incredible things on pushbikes. I won't post the various pornographic videos some of you (thanks Nick) have passed along but the IT guys at work, who've busted me watching them, thank you all the same. You're all going to hate me for this, because I'm going to waste a bunch of your time today. Think of it as a YouTube salad bar; you can dip into whatever you like and give it a taste, just wash your hands first ...

Men have an array of masculine roles to play in society, including the everyday, where many of us presume to know the rules and expectations, such as son, brother, father, husband and boyfriend. Then there are the more specialised male roles, where the majority of us can only guess what the rules are, such as priests, pirates, bouncers, RSL presidents and gigolos. Somewhere in between these extremes is the role of godfather; not all of us will be one, but we like to think we know what's involved. Or I thought I did. Last week I became a godfather for the second time, to the gorgeous Charlotte, who joins my first goddaughter Hatty (aka the Baked Bean), under the sturdy umbrella of my patronage. Aside from the whole "giving spiritual guidance" cliche that everyone seems to pull out when I ask them what a godfather actually does, I have absolutely no idea what I'm meant to do except buy the kid better presents than my other infant relatives ...

There's a certain type of bloke my mates and I call the "Quickdraw". He's more sensitive to temperature than a larval mosquito because whenever the temperature gets above about 18 degrees, the Quickdraw whips off his shirt so he can do some serious, bare-chested strutting. If there's two Quickdraws around, it's a gunfight. Who'll be quickest to get the shirt off first? It can be fun to watch. Bets have been known to be made on who'll win the shoot-out when a group of well-known Quickdraws get together. Needless to say, Quickdraws spend a lot of time in the gym, drink vodka instead of schooners and own a lot of cut-off T-shirts. Thirty years ago, you'd have called the Quickdraw a wanker. Nowadays, women just call him ...

Back in August I posted a column titled How do you say 'Yobbo' in Vietnamese? in which I speculated that a lot of knee-jerk racism towards Asians seemed to be dissolving as the new generation of Asian-Aussie kids developed thick local accents. Many of the people who posted expressed joy someone had written a positive article about integration, citing the profusion of mixed-race relationships in Australia as further proof of our growing tolerance. However, a number of readers highlighted an anomaly when it came to Asians dating "white" Australians. While it's fairly commonplace to see white guys with Asian girls, the opposite – a white girl dating an Asian man – is still something of a rarity ...

And then it's 2am and you're leaning against another bar, in another club and you know what you want, like a damn aching amputee and it's never going to be in this place but you've laid out a couple of hundred on chemicals and grog and cover charges and cabs and the tight maul of cold, gold shame that's there every morning has finally loosened for a few sweet minutes and you'll be f---ed if you're gonna go home without something warm on your arm or at least a close call to masturbate over. You've watched the fresh generation of lurking, pseudo Casanovas and latex playgirls and you're trying to master the plaster of your face, paint it with a likeably indifferent smile and mould your posture into a confident slouch but the question is pounding through you like a migraine. What's the point?

My brain hurts, so we're switching to something easy on the synapses to end the week. Yeah baby, YouTube Friday is back, the lazy writer's best friend. This clip was sent through by a blogger, Nicola, and made me chuckle because it dramatises what I'm thinking at about 60 per cent of weddings I go to nowadays. You know the dude; fighting continuously with his girl? Move in with her. Arguments continue unabated? Marry her. Blues push the hand towards the carving knife? Have a kid. It's an age-old recipe for tragedy repeated the world over. It's why TV stations and breweries stay in business. Anyway, this clip's titled "Honest Wedding Vows" and it got me thinking about what people would say to each other in real life situations if they were completely up front ...

The longer I write this blog the more I realise that for many of you, there's a disconnect going on with women. Some of you seem angry with chicks, others a little in awe, a few are contemptuous (yes, you anon) and many even a little fearful. Women can be intimidating, you'll get no argument from me, but so can running on a football field, starting a new job or learning how to play a killer video game. And we all manage this stuff sooner or later. Talking to the opposite sex is such a fundamental social skill, yet so many blokes have no idea. The only time they can talk to a strange woman is if they're introduced or they've been drinking. By and large, I've stayed out of the whole "dating tips" genre with this blog, because there's a very intelligent and attractive young woman over the other side of the street doing a fantastic job of it. Today, however, I thought I'd weigh in on the subject and share with you the simplest thing you can do to improve your chances with a girl. Talk to her ...

Come on, admit it, you've been busted taking an extended gander* at a member of the opposite sex but, you know what? It's not the end of the world, ladies. Male perving is as involuntary as us jumping to our feet and screaming when our team scores in football. Given, some of my brothers take an optic to unnecessary lengths, but we can be kinda stupid when it comes to women. Some of us went to boys' schools and work in sexy industries such as plumbing (or the internet), so when we get a chance to scope a beautiful girl, well, enthusiasm sometimes gets the better of us. Maybe it's because the word's derived from the term "pervert", but perving's had to gussy up its image in recent years, passing itself off as "sussing" or "checking out" and, my favourite, "people watching". Whatever you want to call it, we all perve, women included – otherwise blokes such as Jamie Durie wouldn't have a career ...

I had a girlfriend some years back who was an incredible lover. I mean mind-blowingly sensual; in the top three, if you know what I mean. We were both pretty young, I was in my mid-20s and she was 21, and at a certain stage of our relationship the thought struck me, "How did she get so good at this?" It prompted "the conversation". I asked her how many men she'd been with and she put a finger to her cheek, acting all coy, then dropped it on me.

"About 25," she said.

"You've been busy," I laughed but part of me was disappointed. I thought, "Damn, I'm dating a lowie*. She gives it out to anybody." Then I thought about how many partners I'd been with and realised I was being extremely hypocritical.

You've heard it before: if a woman sleeps around she's a slut, but if a guy does the same he's a legend. It sucks but it's the way a lot of people think. From my perspective, me sniping about the number of partners my girlfriend had been with, while I enjoyed the benefits of that sexual experience, was like complaining about a smooth landing from a veteran airline pilot ...

It's not every day you become the meat in a sandwich between two TV networks.

The media can be a nasty business and, if you believe what you read in the papers, journalists rank somewhere on the scale of popularity between used-car salesmen and politicians.

Still, as with most industries, there's a certain esprit de corps in our profession and it's uncommon for journos to go after each other in public (they do it in the pub after 10 schooners). That's why I was surprised Friday evening when I got a call telling me, "turn on the TV, you're gonna be on Today Tonight dressed as a woman".

That's weird, I thought, because I'd not done an interview with TT, so how could they possibly run a story with me? Today Tonight, of course, was indulging in the grand journalistic tradition of "the spoiler", which you can view here. They had read on this blog that my adventures as Samantha were going to be aired by A Current Affair, so they trashed the whole thing by running a smear, cobbled together from this website.

The piece, titled "Great Imposter" (which was spelt incorrectly, it's "impostor") was voiced by Dancing with the Stars host Sonia Kruger and described me as an "egotist" and "a man searching for his 15 minutes of fame", as well as a "part-time journalist" – which explains why I get paid so little but not why I spent more than 60 hours working last week.

If you've had any sort of training as a journalist, you'll know that the No. 1 rule when doing a story on a subject is to give them the right of reply, which Kruger and Today Tonight chose not to, because it would have tipped me and ACA off to what they were doing. Imagine my delight then, when on Saturday night I walked into the North Bondi RSL Club and there at the bar was one Ms Sonia Kruger ...

The thing about Samantha is she had a lot of help her first day of existence. A stylist, Sofia Fitzpatrick, dressed her. A make-up artist, Stephanie Tetu, did her face and hair. Anna McPherson at June Dally-Watkins helped her walk. On day two, that all disappeared and things started to go pear-shaped. After a few brutal attempts jabbing myself in the eye with mascara, I looked like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote after a stick of dynamite has blown up in his face. A Current Affair was due at my apartment to begin filming Samantha undercover, so I had to hustle. This is why it pays to know models. Kate Bell has pretty much done it all when it comes to catwalks, clothes and cosmetics and thankfully she lives nearby. I got her on the blower Saturday morning and blubbered my plea: "Katie, we need your help" ...

For my first night as Samantha I wanted to go on a date with a bloke, just to see if I could pull it off, so to speak. When I asked some of my mates would they have the cojones to take me out for dinner, they surprised me with their lameness. "No way in hell, mate," and "Go and get stuffed," were a few of the nicer responses until I called me old China* and fellow writer, Tim Flattery. One of the smartest blokes I know, Tim is an author who has worked in development for film and TV and been one of Australia's leading trend forecasters. He's also pretty secure in his masculinity. "Bloody oath I'll do it," he said on the phone, "I'm gonna show the night of your life, pretty lady." By the time I got home from my makeover on Friday, I was already running late and completely aflutter. My wig was wind blown, I needed to touch up my bison make-up and Tim was due in minutes. Samantha had only been in existence for two hours and already she was keeping a man waiting ...

So it happened, whether you like it or not. Whether you think it was pathetic, tabloid, pointless, brave, curious, sick, stupid or inspired, I spent the long weekend dressing, acting, talking, eating and peeing like a woman and guess what? It was far, far more seismic than I could have imagined. As I said in an earlier blog, I never expected I would pass myself off as a woman the majority of the time and, truth be told, I made a rather unconvincing female. "You look like a bison in a wig," said my flatmate after his second day of living with my alter-ego, Samantha. Nonetheless, I did get to experience a tiny slice of the aggressive male attention women receive, the sometimes torturous beauty treatments they undergo, the frustration of not being able to find clothes that fit and, on more than one occasion, was almost reduced to tears by the assumptions and cruelty flung at me by strangers. In short, it's been one of the most profound experiences of my life ...

You start talking to her at the bar. She has a bunch of vodkas and somethings to take back to her friends, so you help her carry them and she asks you questions past the need to be polite. An hour later, you're sitting together, off by yourselves, laughing about her pet dog that has a disquieting habit of eating its own poop. You're smiling a lot and your cheeks hurt. She has a mesmerising bust that you're doing a great job of not staring at and she's touching you on the leg more and more. The longer you talk, the more nervous you get because you think, "hang about, I'm a big chance here" and if it does happen, well, you'll have to take off your shirt and you know what that means. Finally, amazingly, wonderfully, you end up back at her house, on her bed, touching those boobs. You're both giddy and everything is rolling down the slope of joyous inevitability until you palm open her bra and a wad of tissue paper falls out of the cup like a shelled peanut ...

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